X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own ExtinctionHow humanity came to contemplate its possible extinction. From forecasts of disastrous climate change to prophecies of evil AI superintelligences and the impending perils of genome editing, our species is increasingly concerned with the prospects of its own extinction. With humanity's future on this planet seeming more insecure by the day, in the twenty-first century, existential risk has become the object of a growing field of serious scientific inquiry. But, as Thomas Moynihan shows in X-Risk, this preoccupation is not exclusive to the post-atomic age of global warming and synthetic biology. Our growing concern with human extinction itself has a history. Tracing this untold story, Moynihan revisits the pioneers who first contemplated the possibility of human extinction and stages the historical drama of this momentous discovery. He shows how, far from being a secular reprise of religious prophecies of apocalypse, existential risk is a thoroughly modern idea, made possible by the burgeoning sciences and philosophical tumult of the Enlightenment era. In recollecting how we first came to care for our extinction, Moynihan reveals how today's attempts to measure and mitigate existential threats are the continuation of a project initiated over two centuries ago, which concerns the very vocation of the human as a rational, responsible, and future-oriented being. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Astrobiology | 45 |
Geoscience | 127 |
Forecasting | 201 |
Omnicide | 257 |
Vocation | 341 |
Acknowledgements | 425 |
| 459 | |
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Anders Sandberg animals Anthropocene artificial astrobiology Astronomical become Bernal biological biosphere Bostrom brain Buffon catastrophe century Chardin Ćirković civilisation comet continue cosmic cosmos Cuvier Darwin death dolphin Dyson Earth emergence Enlightenment entire eternal ethical eventually evolution evolutionary existence existential risk explored Extraterrestrial fate Fedorov Fermi Paradox forecast fossil future geological Georges Buffon global globe habitable Haldane Halley Homo sapiens human extinction humanity's humanoids Ibid idea imagined inevitable inorganic intelligence J.B.S. Haldane J.D. Bernal Kant later Leibniz Leopardi living London Lyell matter modern moral nature nature's Odoevsky omnicide organic ourselves Oxford University Press past philosophers physical planet planetary planetary habitability Plenitude population possible worlds potential predicted progress rational realised reason recognise Russian Sacculina Sade scientific scientists sense SETI Shelley Solar System space Space colonization species stars survival technological theory thinking thought threat tion Tsiolkovsky uniformitarianism vision vocation wrote X-risk York